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KeepVid Site No Longer Allows Users To 'Keep' Videos (torrentfreak.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the irony-at-its-finest dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: For many years, KeepVid has been a prime destination for people who wanted to download videos from YouTube, Dailymotion, Facebook, Vimeo, and dozens of other sites. The web application was free and worked without any hassle. This was still the case earlier this month when the site advertised itself as follows: "KeepVid Video Downloader is a free web application that allows you to download videos from sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitch.Tv, Vimeo, Dailymotion and many more." However, a few days ago the site radically changed its course. While the motivation is unknown at the time, KeepVid took its popular video download service offline without prior notice. Today, people can no longer use the KeepVid site to download videos. On the contrary, the site warns that using video download and conversion tools might get people in trouble. "Video downloading from the Internet will become more and more difficult, and KeepVid encourages people to download videos via the correct and legal ways," the new KeepVid reads. The site now lists several alternative options to enjoy videos and music, including Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, and Pandora.

7 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. bye bye by supernova87a · · Score: 4, Informative

    The site's content is straight out of Google Translate engine and smacks of someone in a foreign country being hit with a lawsuit and putting up this content to satisfy the terms of the settlement. Goodbye, keepvid.com, as you get forgotten in the search rankings.

  2. Who cares? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just use youtube-dl or a browser extension.

    1. Re:Who cares? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      In my experience, sites break youtube-dl frequently. It often fails the first time I use it in a day. But it's almost always already been fixed; all I need to do is check for an update and it's working again.

  3. Use youtube-dl by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It can download from most major sites and even a few of the smaller ones. It let's you pick what format the video is (or only the audio from YouTube videos if you prefer to listen to them as podcasts).

  4. Re:Meh by sexconker · · Score: 3, Informative

    Otherwise I can just as easily Inspect Element on video streams and get the direct URL of it to download.

    No you can't. Most major platforms have layers and layers of obfuscating javascript, and the actual resource URL isn't exposed in the DOM, and neither is the key you need to get a working response from the server.

    And many platforms have obnoxious DRM on top of that.

  5. Just use youtube-dl or quvi by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It is a bad idea to rely on web sites such as keepvid that are full of ads and incomprehensible scripts that do god-knows-what.

    It is a much better idea to instead use a free and open-source video-downloader such as youtube-dl or quvi.

    And if the maintainers/developers of youtube-dl or quvi decide to discontinue the project and "encourage people to download videos via the correct and legal ways", then you can always fork the code. That's the beauty of free/libre software.

    This situation is a perfect example of why Richard Stallman warned about "Service as a Software Substitute (SASS)". i.e. websites that offer a "service", that should instead be done by a software program running locally on your computer, fully under your control.

  6. Re:Meh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    youtube-dl works well for youtube and many other sites.